mindfieldz

Inside the mind of a geeky learning technologist

May 3, 2012
by Ben
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This week, I have been mostly watching Geek and Sundry.

There is something very odd about seeing a grown-up Will Wheaton playing TableTop games; in my head, he’s still about 15 and on the Enterprise bridge (TNG). The Flog is also worth a watch to see all the gaming and meme references.

February 14, 2012
by Ben
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Downloadable Content (DLC)

This post is a rant, I warn you now, it’s not going to be pretty. It’s part-based in a dilemma I face this month, as I do a few times every year: Should I pre-order game X? I know what you’re thinking, if I pre-order, I’ll get my game of choice on release day (or soon after, thank you Royal Mail), and I can eagerly play to my heart’s content. However, this isn’t so much of an issue for me, because:

  1. I mostly download games through the likes of Steam, no need to wait for postie;
  2. I have a 50Mb internet connection (soon to be 100Mbit, thank you Virgin Media)

So, my dilemma isn’t: Should I pre-order this so that I can get it on release day? No, my dilemma is: Should I pre-order this so that I can get the pre-order DownLoadable Content (DLC)?

Continue Reading →

January 13, 2012
by Ben
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Fixing your Moodle statistics

Moodle statistics are great. Personally, every October, I scream like a schoolgirl and wave the most recent statistics graph at my colleagues whilst shouting at how all the numbers are bigger. However, it seems that on busier servers, especially one like ours with 700,000 actions in one month, Moodle can easily fall behind.

For the past three months, since October 2011, our Moodle serve hasn’t been compiling statistics.

I can’t fully demonstrate the symptoms here, as I only decided to write this blog post after I had fixed things. But if you look at the graph below, you’ll see an earlier month where statistics also failed. 1st April 2011 has no actions logged.

Moodle statistics

Example Moodle statistics

This fix works on Moodle 1.9.3+, it should also work on Moodle 2.0 but some of the lines might be slightly different. YMMV

So… how to fix it… well… Continue Reading →

January 12, 2012
by Ben
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Fresh start

My existing blog was getting a bit irregular and out of date, both in terms of content and plugins/designs.

I’ve decided on a bit of a fresh start, partly driven by the new blogs of my colleagues (see links), but also driven by the new year.

Hopefully, this attempt will be a bit more regular.